


Flex Your Soul

by aeli_kindara



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky is a little shit, Captain America Sam Wilson, Gen, Humor, PTSD, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), a bit of imposter syndrome for poor Sam there, actual old men Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers, in which Steve Rogers cannot cook an egg, with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 06:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20596094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: The magazine proof arrives in the mail one week before it’s going to hit newsstands. Sam slides it out of the manila envelope — it comes glossy and slithering — and stares for a full minute at his face on the cover. His folded arms, his t-shirt with its shield.Or: the one where Sam Wilson gets a "Men's Health" cover as the new Captain America.





	Flex Your Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This is just — silliness. With some feelings.
> 
> Inspired by Anthony Mackie's [Men's Health cover](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS506US510&biw=1280&bih=694&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTadXb4QCmcP_MPkimGo6Bkz7-Kjg%3A1568155013928&sa=1&ei=hSV4XZeaOK6w5wL0yI_YBg&q=anthony+mackie+men%27s+health+cover&oq=anthony+mackie+men%27s+health+cover&gs_l=img.3...1420.1420..1460...0.0..0.0.0.......0....1..gws-wiz-img.hsYvx2cyyQI&ved=0ahUKEwjX8LrUqMfkAhUu2FkKHXTkA2sQ4dUDCAY&uact=5) (back in June, for [this feature](https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a28120934/anthony-mackie-falcon-captain-america-marvel/)). I couldn't stop thinking about the shit Bucky would give him if it happened in-world, so... here we are.
> 
> This fic does also touch on some serious topics like PTSD, human trafficking, and separated families, if you'd rather avoid.
> 
> Meant to read as gen, but I think this is both Steve/Bucky- and Sam/Bucky-friendly, if either floats your boat.

The magazine proof arrives in the mail one week before it’s going to hit newsstands. Sam slides it out of the manila envelope — it comes glossy and slithering — and stares for a full minute at his face on the cover. His folded arms, his t-shirt with its shield.

It seems like something a fan would wear. The stylist said that was intentional, something about readers seeing themselves in him. He glances across the room at the real thing, leaning against a wall — shit, he should really put it back in its case — and shakes his head.

_ Who is the new CAPTAIN AMERICA? _the magazine cover demands. His name is right there under it, but it’s in smaller print, colored red. It seems tentative; a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

_ SUPERHERO SHRED! _ shouts the headline above the title. _ BEST. SUMMER. _ _ EVER _ _ , _ declares another, then adds: _ Sex. Ice Cream. CBD. Beaches. and _ _ Beer__! _

Under that is another headline, in red like his name, and bulging cartoonishly: _ FLEX YOUR SOUL: The next frontier in mental health. _ They let him give a quote for that, when he came to the offices for his photo shoot; the writer had slipped into the back of the room as camera flashes blared in his eyes, but he didn’t see her until later. They were letting him pause to mop sweat off his face and she was suddenly right there: “Excuse me Mr. Wilson, I’m sorry to bother you but I just wanted to let you know I’m a big fan —“

He’d braced himself. Steve was always so good at this stuff, the smiling and autographing, and Sam had worked out a pretty cool Falcon signature for himself once, with wings and everything. He wasn’t sure how to sign things as Captain America yet; he wasn’t sure if he _ should _sign things as Captain America. Would he look like the worst kind of asshole if he told her no?

“— of your work with veterans; I’m writing a piece right now, actually, about PTSD in survivors versus victims of the Snap —“

He’d blinked. Twice. 

After the shoot was over, he went to find her office. He’d sat there across the desk from her and listened — talked, but mostly listened, as she explained that she’d been a newlywed five years ago; that her husband, a Navy vet, had been among the missing; that their relearning each other had been slow and painful and beautiful and gotten her thinking about trauma in whole new ways. Then she popped her chewing gum and added that the magazine mostly had her interviewing athletes but that she’d fought hard for this article, and if he _ wanted _ to give her a quote —

He’d left the office building feeling strangely buoyant. Pepper had pushed him into this whole thing, gently but implacably — the cover shoot, the feature story — and he hadn’t been sure about it anywhere along the way. He wasn’t Tony, and he wasn’t Steve. But that interview — that interview made him feel good. Like maybe he’s doing something that matters.

Now, staring down at the object in his hands, he’s less sure. He feels like an imposter, a flimsy facsimile of a superhero. Never mind _ the _ superhero.

In a week, people will see this. His mom and his friends and all the girls and guys down at the VA; will they think he’s got a big head?

Steve, at least, has given his blessing: an absent _ Yeah, yeah, of course, _but a blessing nonetheless. And Steve did his time as a showgirl, back in the day; and Steve has this weird unshakable faith in Sam that he doesn’t really understand. Steve, at least, won’t judge.

Bucky —

_ Oh, God. _His face feels hot just thinking about it.

Bucky is going to have the time of his _ life. _

\---

For a week, the magazine stays firmly hidden, face-down in its envelope on the top of Sam’s dresser under a pile of unmatched socks.

He almost hides it under the bed, but that seems a little too much like admitting defeat; he’s not _ supposed _ to feel shame. This is supposed to be a good thing, a public service — a reintroduction of himself to the American public.

After all, it’s public knowledge that he’s out there carting around Captain America’s shield. Steve even gave a brief, mild interview about it when a reporter ran into him at a charity thing. _ The best possible man for the job, _ said the headline.

On their next mission Bucky had seen it in a newsstand and snorted. “He’s been on all week about that. He said _ person, _ why can’t they print person, he’s been thinking _ a lot _ about gender and maybe he should write a letter to the editor —“

“What, and you’re gonna stop him?” Sam had asked, raising his eyebrows. 

Bucky just slid his AI goggles up his nose and checked his weapons. The plates of his arm rippled as he made a fist. That thing was _ so fucking cool; _ Sam wanted vibranium wings.

“Please. I made him write it again, with one third the exclamation points,” Bucky said, then counted down silently — three fingers, two, one — and burst through the warehouse door. 

Later, once they’d rounded up the human trafficking ring and delivered their victims safely to the local hospital and its army of waiting volunteers, Sam had asked, in a voice that came out weirdly strained: “Seriously, you’re not, like — ticked off about all this? Watching me try to fill your —” he wasn’t sure _ what _to call Steve’s relationship to Bucky; all the relevant terms felt inadequate — “Steve’s shoes?”

Bucky had stared flatly. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been trying to get him to put that thing down for a _ lifetime. _ A _ lot of lifetimes. _ Getting to watch you klutz around and trip over it; that’s just gravy to me.”

“Hey, that was _ once. _”

For a minute, he didn’t think Bucky would answer. His eyes were somewhere off in the middle distance; thinking, maybe, of the lifetimes he’d missed out on, or of the kids they’d saved today, the ones who’d been dusted so young and innocent and come back unable to find their parents; who’d been scooped up by traffickers instead. Sam had seen some shit in his day, but this might be the worst of it. Bucky had seen some shit too. 

“It’s like a puppy,” said Bucky, slowly and with relish, and it took Sam’s mind a moment to catch up. “Whose paws are too big for its body, and it falls over them everywhere —“

Sam contemplated this for a moment. Only a moment.

Then he hit Bucky over the head with his shield.

\---

The day of the magazine release is — honestly kind of anticlimactic.

Sam’s bracing himself for kind of a shitstorm on Twitter — you don’t get to be the first black Captain America without dealing with your share of racist trolls, and they’ve been sniffing around plenty already — but when he gets up that morning there’s a text from Steve on his phone. _ Up for a run? _

So Sam goes. He’s not sure if Steve’s slowed down enough over his extra decades that Sam can actually keep up, or if he’s just playing nice; either way, they match pace for miles, and stop in sweaty and laughing at a deli once they’re done. The woman behind the counter is unflappable; she serves them their several bagels and a black-and-white cookie apiece and Steve’s roast beef sandwich and goes back to her Sudoku without a second glance. It’s weird, Sam thinks, how things go in and out of style; before he got poofed off the mortal plane, Sudoku’s run seems pretty much done. 

They’re miles from Sam’s apartment, but they walk back anyway, talking amiably about nothing. Twice, they get stopped for a photo — that shit is easier to handle with Steve there ready to slip into camera mode — and Sam notices his face on the magazine rack once, through the glass doors of a pharmacy, but it’s nothing too bad. When they get back, Steve invites himself into Sam’s kitchen to make eggs — that man is _ always hungry _ — and proceeds to burn them while Sam skims through his mentions. They’re not that bad, actually; plenty of assholes, but lots of positivity too, and a few people even read _ FLEX YOUR SOUL. _

_ I’ve always been a big fan of the Falcon, _ one person writes, _ but I never knew that story about Riley. It made me cry. _

For an instant, Sam’s throat closes up.

The beeping of his smoke alarm shakes him out of his thoughts. Steve pulls the skillet hastily from its burner, and then fumbles through the alarm’s shrieking to get its casing off the wall, to remove the battery. When he’s done, Sam is laughing, and Steve surveys his smoking mess of a cooking attempt with consternation. “Bucky always makes this look _ so easy. _How does he make it look so easy?”

“He’s just smarter than you, pal,” Sam offers, and Steve gives him a reproachful look and says, “That’s it. I’m not letting you two hang out anymore.”

\---

His VA buddies give him a good-natured hard time and keep trying to sneak up on him to feel his biceps. His mom cooks him a congratulatory my-son-was-in-the-magazine dinner and bursts into tears halfway through. Clint keeps sending him ever more horrific photoshops of the cover, and Thor even texts him from somewhere, an unintelligible string of words that might be in some alien language and might be a video game reference; Sam isn’t sure. _ Fly free, little bird! _it says at the end, and Sam stares at it for a minute before shaking his head and putting his phone down.

Pepper keeps emailing him roundups of his news coverage, summarized in terse prose and an elegant font. The Spider-Man kid sends him a weird rambling video message, and so does Ant-Man, though his is much longer and seems to be filmed inside someone’s shoe. Bruce invites him to do a photoshoot together, which Sam politely declines.

He keeps thinking about what Natasha would say. He misses her like a limb.

Bucky says nothing.

At first, Sam thinks he maybe hasn’t seen it. Bucky’s not big on social media, and who actually buys magazines these days anyway? But as the week passes, it starts to feel — well — _ weird. _

They get calls, as usual; Bucky’s motorbike or his spaceship-looking Wakandan jet thing roars up outside Sam’s apartment as usual. They take down bad guys as usual. Bucky makes fun of him as usual.

But he _ doesn’t mention the magazine. _

Maybe he’s actually offended by it in some way. Maybe Bucky’s run out of patience for his haphazard attempts to live up to the legacy of Captain America. Maybe he gives zero fucks about a magazine cover and Sam is over here being a diva expecting everyone to swoon about it. Maybe —

It’s _ kind of a big deal, _ he tells himself. It’s basically his Captain America coming-out party. It’s not insane of him to want his friends to notice.

Is Bucky his friend?

They work together. Bucky just kind of started that, without any announcement or fanfare; maybe it was at Steve’s urging. He could be doing the whole thing under protest. It’s not like he’s given to grand gestures or long heart-to-hearts, except maybe where Steve is concerned. Maybe his silences and sarcasm hide genuine disdain.

_ Maybe he’s fucking with you, _ points out a rational voice in his brain.

But he has to know. He unearths the magazine from the pile of socks, hesitates, then goes and puts it in the pile of mail on his kitchen counter. Casual, half-obscured. Like it just arrived with the bills and he hasn’t dealt with it yet.

Bucky’s there that very evening; they’re narrowing on a bigger trafficking ring, working overtime, and they can’t afford to overlook any lead. He leans against the countertop where the magazine is waiting and goes over the new intel and doesn’t turn his head once.

Sam leaves the mail stack for three more days.

At some point, though, he has to actually open his bills. He does, and pays them, and moves the magazine to the rack next to the coffee table. “Hey, man,” he says, next time Bucky is there with a folder of new surveillance shots, “can we move this to the living room? My hip is killing me today.”

He has an excuse. A superhero fight with a fellow flight-suited villain last week. It’s not _ insane _ that his hip might be hurting; it doesn’t make him _ weak. _

He levers himself into an armchair with care, as if it’s painful. Bucky slouches on the sofa. The magazine is right by his knee. It’s practically brushing. To make things worse, his leg starts to jiggle as he works. Sam’s own paper-and-ink gaze is burning a hole through him.

Bucky doesn’t notice.

At last, in desperation, Sam moves the magazine to the bathroom. He’s never kept magazines in the bathroom; he doesn’t read in the bathroom. But people do that, he knows, and Bucky can’t miss it there. He _ can’t. _

Because Sam has an ace in the hole, here. He knows Bucky can’t resist coffee in the mornings. And he knows coffee makes Bucky, like so many other lesser mortals, need to take a shit.

There aren’t many fields of physical prowess where Sam can best a supersoldier, but this is one. He knows it’s petty of him, but he’s been delighted by the knowledge ever since he figured it out with Steve, years ago: the serum does a lot for a guy, but it also demands calories, and a diet that intense does not for a docile digestive system make.

So he brews coffee. He sees Bucky’s gaze twitch toward it the moment he’s inside the door, and pours him an obliging mug; sure enough, Bucky gulps it down, and it’s not twenty minutes before he’s sliding from his chair and down the hall to the bathroom.

Sam waits. He goes over the reports again: there’s some possibility that the traffickers are using abandoned college dorms to store their victims. That suggests enough of a connection to know their way around campus; colleges are confusing places these days, with the influx of recently returned students plus the older twenty-somethings who let those things fall by the wayside after the Snap and suddenly want to start living their lives again. Even keeping track of people’s ages has been a headache; is Sam five years older than when he disappeared, or a few months?

The toilet flushes. Without lifting his chin or setting down the papers in his hands, Sam raises his eyes to watch the hall.

Bucky steps out of the bathroom and lets the door drift closed behind him. He turns, and catches Sam looking at him. For a moment, just a moment, something crosses his face like the beginnings of a laugh. Then it’s gone, and he’s crossing the kitchen, reaching wordlessly for the newest report.

His eyes scan it. Sam waits.

Bucky says, “I guess we’d better go undercover.”

\---

The text comes two days later. _ Meet me at the campus food court got news _

Sam suppresses a wave of annoyance. _ We’d better go undercover, _ Bucky’d said, and now he’s gone off and done it by himself; what’s the point of partners if they don’t tell you their plans? Sam eyes his wardrobe, trying to decide what would make him look most like a douchey college bro. In the end, he goes professorial instead: a button-down shirt, dark jeans. He adds a laptop bag that’s really a weapons case. If only he had glasses that weren’t obviously AI.

When he gets to the campus food court, he can’t find Bucky anywhere.

He checks inside first, at the high-backed booths that might afford them some privacy to talk, and finds nothing. Outside is a sprawl of aluminum chairs and white metal tables with broken umbrellas, glaring at him in the sun; Sam squints doubtfully at the sea of students occupying them. There’s no Bucky there. He checks indoors again.

It takes him another ten minutes to admit defeat. He sighs as he steps back outside the building, looking down at his phone. Is there another food court on campus somewhere —?

“Hey, man,” says someone. “Are you Captain America?”

Sam turns. The kid sitting at the table behind him has dark sunglasses and a white snapback over his shaggy hair. He’s eating ice cream, and he’s got his feet up on the table. He’s wearing flip-flops, white jeans, and a dark navy muscle tee, with the shield emblazoned across the front.

It’s Sam’s outfit. From the photoshoot.

He’s dealt with fans, but this is maybe kind of an uncomfortable level of fan.

“Um, no,” he tries. “You must have me confused with —”

The guy at the table reaches for the bookbag behind him. He pulls out a rolled up magazine, sliding his sunglasses off as he does. He scrounges for a moment longer, face hidden, before he comes up with a pen.

When he turns back, his face is deadly earnest.

“Would you sign my magazine?” Bucky asks.

\---

“You asshole,” says Sam. “You — _ asshole.” _

He takes a reeling step back, laptop bag thumping against his hip. He feels out of breath, relief and laughter and indignation bubbling at his chest. He gestures inarticulately, then remembers there’s a standard practice for that, and raises his middle finger.

Bucky lets out a cackling laugh.

“I’m going to kill you. I’m going to report you to your superiors.”

“I don’t have any superiors,” Bucky points out.

“I’ll report you to Steve.”

“Where do you think I got the shirt?”

Sam thinks that’s a joke. He hopes it’s a joke. Steve’s not enough of a tool to go running around wearing his own merch.

Now that he knows it’s Bucky, he can see the faint shimmer of unreality on his left arm: it’s not real skin, just a vibranium seeming. It does well enough when Bucky stays still, but anyone watching closely will see his arm doesn’t flex and yield like you’d expect it to. The shadows don’t fall on it quite right.

As Sam watches, Bucky makes a small movement with his wrist, and the illusion drops away. The metal that gleams underneath is blue-gray.

“I hope you brought weapons,” Bucky says. “I did some snooping. This is a big one. Now come on, sign my magazine and let’s go.”

\---

They find them on the top floor of what used to be Woodbridge Hall, shackled three-to-a-bed. They’re skinny and starving, and not all are kids — there are adults, too. One woman flings herself in front of her two young bedmates, arms spread, shouting something like _ you’ll never take them alive! _

Sam has seen this before, a few times: parents who return from the Snap and are so unable to deal with the five years their children have lived without them that something inside them just — breaks. _ My children, _ she keeps screaming, as Sam unshackles her bedmates — they’re five and seven years old, they tell him, their names are Jackie and Malia — _ they’re taking my children! _ Finally, Bucky finds her pressure point and lowers her, gently, to the floor.

The captives are unguarded, but company doesn’t take more than five minutes to arrive. The woman stirs, and then she’s screaming: “_ Help us! Help us! There are two of them, they’re trying to take us away! _”

“Ma’am, we’re the _ good _ guys,” Bucky tells her, annoyed. He’s still wearing his snapback; he fires a covering shot down the stairwell as Sam furls his wings, drops out the window, and swoops up through, a struggling trafficker held tight in his arms. It’s in time to see Bucky pulling the magazine out of his bag again, hand it to the woman. “Captain America. See?”

She stares, for a moment, at Bucky’s t-shirt.

“Ugh. No. Him, not me,” says Bucky, and turns in time to punch another trafficker in the head.

The final haul is ten criminals and more than seventy victims. There are news helicopters swooping in by the time they’re done, police cordoning off the street. An army of EMTs attend the vics. Looking out the window, Sam sees a girl of maybe eleven break through the line of caution tape. Her father sees it too late; he reaches for her, but she’s gone.

She runs directly up to a woman sitting on the curb: Bucky’s nemesis. She’s still clutching the magazine. “Mom,” the girl is saying, “_ Mom? _”

It takes the woman’s gaze a moment to focus in. Her blonde hair is brittle and tangled; her arms are like wires. And then she’s breathing fast, too fast, gulping in oxygen — “_Claire?_” — and she takes her long-lost daughter in her arms.

Bucky turns away from the window. He gestures at his Captain America t-shirt. “I can’t go out there looking like this. Trade with me.”

Which is how Sam finds himself answering questions in his own photoshoot gear, standing there surrounded by reporters while families laugh and sob and reunite all around him.

\---

“Your wingman,” says Bucky, later, as they’re cleaning their gear. “Riley.”

Sam stills. “You read the article?”

Bucky smirks. “_Flex your souuuul,_” he mimics, but a moment later the smile drops. “Does it suck, watching all these families find the person they lost, and knowing you’ll never get yours?”

Sam’s already answered that question, if put in a more sensitive way. It’s in the article. He’d spoken honestly: _ I’m overjoyed that there are people who get to have that reunion. I wouldn’t begrudge it to anyone in the world. _

“Sometimes it sucks,” he admits.

Bucky nods like he already knew that. “Me and Steve talked about it. About what — me falling was like for him. I think I sort of forgave him about it.”

“Forgave him?” Sam repeats.

It takes Bucky a moment to answer. He sights into the barrel of his gun, runs the cleaning rod decisively down its length. “I, uh,” he says, “I don’t remember a lot, from when HYDRA had me, but I remember — early days. When I was still in a fever and halfway to coma and they hadn’t really started in on me yet, they — told me, about Steve’s plane going down. That he’d killed Schmidt _ and _ himself.”

The pieces fit together in Sam’s mind. “You were angry.”

Bucky snorts. “_So _ fucking angry. You have no idea how angry. Punk was supposed to survive the war and go home and marry Peggy and have fifteen pig-headed babies, and then he goes and dumps himself in the ocean.”

For a moment, Sam lets himself think about it: what might have happened, if Riley had lived.

“That’s what brought me back. When I recognized him, on the Triskelion. I wanted to punch him in the face for that _ so bad_, I stopped punching him in the face.”

Sam considers this. He says, “You didn’t give him permission to love you like you loved him.”

Again, Bucky snorts. But his hands are very still; his eyes are somewhere far away. Brooklyn, maybe. 1943.

“Yeah,” he says, “guess not.”

Before Sam can comment further, Bucky’s reaching out for the remote, flipping on the TV. It’s tuned to the nightly news; before Sam can object, his own face is filling the screen, cameras flashing, the shield bright on his chest.

The video cuts to another interview. “Captain America saved me,” the woman says, her eyes streaming. “I tried to stop him — I was so confused — and he saved me just the same.” She has her daughter clutched to her side, looking out shyly from behind a magazine.

The footage cuts back to Sam. The wingpack makes the t-shirt even tighter than usual. “You can’t help it now,” Bucky tells him. “That’s your look.”

Sam considers it. Maybe he can add _ FLEX YOUR SOUL _ to the shirt somewhere. He should call the magazine, make sure that’s cool. Do headlines have copyrights?

The scene on the TV is changing; more reunions. People are laughing, crying, hugging. Bucky’s lingering by a wall in the background, but Sam can see him smile.

There’s a smile on his own face. Maybe the shirt makes him look like an idiot, but after all, it’s a shirt for fans. He’s a fan. Of Captain America, and everything he stands for.

He says, “I guess I can live with that.”


End file.
